Hi,
I'm a collector of Commodore computers interested in the 1572 disk drive which was never released. I would like to ask you, Bil, if you know any technical details about this disk drive? Do you know who was responsible for the development of the 1572? Why was the 1572 never released? Was the 1572 shown at the CES 1985 a working prototype or just a mock-up? What happened to the 1572 shown at the CES?
Thanks in advance for your response.
Martin

As a user, I'm strictly guessing the 1572 was never released because of competition from the CMD hard drive which I will guess was around $399 or $499 for 10 or 20 megabytes. I'm guessing the 1571 was slightly more than the 1541 disk drive. The 1572 has more features because it had more ram and was double sided so I'm guessing that Commodore would have to price the 1572 between the 1571 and the CMD hard drive. It was also shortly thereafter that Commodore also had the 1581 Disk Drive. A customer probably would have been thinking that for a little more money, they could have a CMD 20 Megabyte hard drive. This is where marketing and personalities at the magazines give commentaries because of the prejudice of their positions instead of letting the features of the devices sell themselves which means the editor was trying to figure things out instead of letting the product sell because of its advanced features.
It is also a time when Commodore probably was also selling ram expanders for the C-64 and C-128, modems and Commodore also dropped the price of the Commodore 64 because they might have released the C-16 but you would have to look through Compute!,Compute's Gazette, Run magazine or Ahoy! to figure out the time line and the prices. Another thing was it was my perception that liquidators bought up and overstocked on large quantities of the 1571 already so trying to make a 1572 compete against the lower prices (prices based on volume) was probably a hard sell. And then the user would probably look at the Apple GS line and think that they could probably get one of them for the same price which was why Commodore had to be cheaper because it was part of their advertising ploy to lay out an ad with a Commodore against a PC and a Mac with the prices and show how much of a value that you could get because the Commodore was cheaper.
I had thought that Commodore wanted the C-64 and C-128 to be phased out to make room for the Amiga and I'm thinking that maybe Commodore was trying to sell the 8 bit line at that time to another vendor.

Fred Bowen reports that it was just a dual disck version of the 1571. I dont think CBM would ever have changed a plan because of a worry about third party competition (they couldnt compete) In fact I never heard of CMD until I had been out of CBM several years. ;)